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THE BANALITY OF GOOD
to achieve policy ends”! On the other hand the State Parties themselves were
“frustrated with the Court, which they consider does not deliver full value for the
funding their taxpayers provide, in terms of reducing the incidence of the crimes
set out in the Rome Statute, through convictions and deterrence.”" Bringing
the discussion down a level from principles to technical issues and putting it in
the hands of independent experts would create space to have a more productive
dialogue between the Court proper and the ASP on the ICC’s path forward. To
the experts’ credit, they managed to gain the trust of the ICC’s staff, which shows
in the candor of the report.
THE REPORT IN CONTEXT OF THE STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL COURTS
To say that the field of international court’s research is a growing field is a little
bit of an understatement. There are currently two main centres of excellence in
Europe dedicated to researching all types of international courts,” as well as
several individual or institutional projects focusing on the subject in the past
and present. As international courts have grown in maturity so has the field.
Moreover, it is not just that international courts proper are the object of study,
the UN human rights bodies, the WTO dispute settlement mechanism, as well as
investor-state arbitrations are also commonly studied.
In addition, various aspects of these courts and tribunals have been and are
under study, from their independence, accountability, transparency, the election
of judges/arbitrators, their effectiveness, the relationship with states as well as
specific branches of government within a state, the dialogue between international
courts, their democratic deficit and legitimacy and the possible ways that they
could be addressed. Moreover, it is also safe to say that the courts based in Europe
are overstudied, while those based in other regions of the world, especially in
Africa, are understudied.
But more importantly than what topics have been studied is the way that
international courts (ICs) have been studied. To illustrate, I will present a discussion
10 The Report, para. 948.
1 Tbid para. 949.
PluriCourts Centre for the Study of the Legitimate Roles of the International Judiciary in the
Global Order, based at the University of Oslo, Norway, and iCourts, based at the University
of Copenhagen, Denmark.
See for instance Yuval Shany (ed.), Assessing the Effectiveness of International Courts,
Oxford, OUP, 2014, a result of a ERC grant at the Hebrew university of Tel Aviv, as well
as the Project on International Courts and Tribunals (PICT) coordinating the research of
several European universities under which the Selecting International Judges study was
conducted.
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